How to choose correct profile on different environments for Docker and Docker-Compose? - spring

Question

Actually I have checked some questions like this
What I do not understand is; if I change my docker-compose.yml and add profile to it then should I leave the Dockerfile without profile ?
For example my docker-compose file:
backend:
container_name: backend
image: backend
build: ./backend
restart: always
deploy:
restart_policy:
condition: on-failure
max_attempts: 15
ports:
- '8080:8080'
environment:
- MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=DbPass3008
- MYSQL_PASSWORD=DbPass3008
- MYSQL_USER=DbUser
- MYSQL_DATABASE=db
depends_on:
- mysql
And I will add:
environment:
- "SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=test
As far as I understand I need to put 3 different compose file and run them with -f parameter for different environments like:
docker-compose -f docker-compose-local/test/prod up -d
But my question is that my Dockerfile is already specifying profile as:
FROM openjdk:17-oracle
ADD ./target/backend-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar backend.jar
EXPOSE 8080
ENTRYPOINT ["java","-jar", "-Dspring.profiles.active=TEST", "backend.jar"]
So how should I change this Dockerfile? Even if I create 3-4 different compose file, they are all using same Dockerfile. Should I create different Dockerfiles too (seems ridicilous) but what is the correct way ?

Answer 1

There's no need to add a java -Dspring.profiles.active=... command-line option; Spring will recognize the runtime SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE environment variable on its own. That means all of your environments can use the same image (which is generally a good practice).
Compose can also expand host environment variables in some contexts, so you may be able to use a single Compose file with environment-variable references
version: '3.8'
services:
backend:
environment:
- SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=${ENVIRONMENT:-dev}
ENVIRONMENT=test docker-compose up -d
I tend to discourage putting environment-specific settings in a src/main/resources/*.yml file, since it means you need to recompile the application jar file whenever you deploy to a new environment. Another possibility is to set most Spring properties as environment variables, and then use multiple Compose files to include environment-specific settings. The one downside here is that you need multiple docker-compose -f options and you need to repeat them on every docker-compose invocation.